At its best when reflecting real historical situations ... Rebecca Lenkiewicz's Her Naked Skin at the National Theatre. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
So David Hare's new play, Gethsemane, is apparently a fictional response to the New Labour ethos. No great surprise there; Hare's whole career has been predicated on a belief that theatre should chart the state of the nation.
Plenty offered a vivid account of Britain's post-1945 disillusion epitomised by the Suez fiasco, while The Secret Rapture dealt with the psychological impulses of Thatcherism. And, having explored Old Labour's tragic failure of nerve in The Absence of War, it was only a matter of time before Hare turned his attention to the Blair years. Even if Gethsemane is fiction, it is, by all accounts, driven by Hare's reaction to public events.
It would be premature to start discussing the play. What is significant, however, is the trend it represents. To an extraordinary degree, drama today is much less about the creation of imaginary worlds than a reflection of historic or current reality. The National this year has offered us a string of biographical plays dealing with Harold Macmillan, the polar explorer Nansen, and the Austrian director, Max Reinhardt. Even Rebecca Lenkiewicz's Her Naked Skin is at its best when it confronts the painful humiliations inflicted on the hunger-striking suffragettes of 1913.
Reports from Edinburgh have highlighted plays like Philip Ralph's Deep Cut, tackling the death of a female soldier at Deepcut Barracks, and Simon Stephens's Pornography, inspired by the London bombings of July 2005. And the Royal Court's autumn season opens with Christopher Shinn's Now or Later set on election night in the US.
What are we to make of all this? Does this signal the exhaustion of the imagination and decay of conventional forms? Or does it argue that theatre, in an age of growing cynicism about politicians and the media, is seen as a source of information and untarnished comment. It may, I suspect, be a mixture of both. Conventional narratives, of the old who's-sleeping-with-whom variety, now seem increasingly tired and stale, partly because of saturation bombardment by TV soaps: it takes a work of real linguistic or technical mastery, like Pinter's Betrayal or Stoppard's The Real Thing, to refresh, for instance, the age-old topic of middle-class adultery.
Wearied by the banality of TV drama and appalled both by political spin and media manipulation, theatre audiences clearly hunger either for raw fact or for a creative response to the times they live in.
Verbatim drama, of the kind supplied by the Tricycle or Out of Joint's The Permanent Way, has satisfied the hunger for information. Works such as Alistair Beaton's Feelgood and Justin Butcher's The Madness of George Dubya have shown the crying need for satire of public figures. And David Hare and David Edgar have proved, like Robert Harris in his most recent novel, that it is perfectly legitimate to apply fictional techniques to factual matters.
Writers will continue to make up stories. But all the evidence at the moment is that theatrical drama is driven by a reaction to public events. And I, for one, heartily welcome this. The days when we looked, exclusively, to Newsnight or Panorama to tell us about the public world and to theatre to explore our private dilemmas have long gone. Theatre today fulfils an urgent need by offering a sustained commentary on the historic past or contemporary politics; and, while this doesn't guarantee the production of timeless masterpieces, it confirms the medium's social relevance and ability to do vital work in the world.
